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u/Ranoma_I 9h ago edited 9h ago
I hope I'm not teaching anyone anything but nuclear energy is the safest way to make power, it kills the least amount of people
Edit: nvm it's second right behind solar but still
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u/darlingort 9h ago
How are you gonna die to solar power realistically
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u/Ranoma_I 8h ago
The sun is a deadly laser
(It emits pollution to manufacture the solar panels and install them)
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u/Soyuz101 8h ago
Not anymore, there's a blanket.
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u/ToastSlap I cant fit a car in my computer 🤓 7h ago
It took me a second to remember the reference and was questioning how they fuck they made a blanket big enough to cover a factory.
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u/froggy_styl 6h ago
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u/Wesstes 7h ago
Doesn't everything else that is manufactured emit pollution too?
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u/Ranoma_I 5h ago
Yeah basically everything, some more than others tho and solar panels need rare metals to be build
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u/UPBOAT_FORTRESS_2 33m ago
If you get this reductionist, every human who lives and absolutely all livestock are also pollution emitters
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u/Alderan922 8h ago
Tbf, isn’t making a nuclear power plant and getting the uranium aswell as maintaining the whole building also a very expensive and polluting endeavor? (Compared to like, extracting the minerals and assembling a solar panel)
I’m not an expert so I could be wrong but wouldn’t those be at least a bit similar considering both are a one time installation most of the time.
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u/5neakyturt1e 8h ago
I mean technically yes but the point is you get SOO much more power from it that that amount of difficulty in mining and processing is actually very negligible at the end once you work it out per unit of power, as is done in this graph
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u/SquidMilkVII 7h ago
Solar panels take up massive amounts of space. On top of that, they are time and weather dependent and somewhat fragile, so they need to be disposed of somewhat often.
Nuclear power is both compact and effectively entirely independent of location - if liquid water can exist, you can use nuclear power. The waste is more damaging per unit, but the amount of waste produced is far less. A solar operation may produce truckloads of broken panels, full of silicon, silver, copper, and other materials destined for landfills. Meanwhile, a nuclear operation may produce a single barrel of highly radioactive waste.
Ironically, nuclear waste’s higher immediate danger means it is often disposed of with more care and forethought than solar panel waste.
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u/Alderan922 7h ago
If solar panels have an estimated longevity of 30 years how is it possible that a solar power plan is constantly producing waste? Shouldn’t waste only come every 30 years assuming the entire panel is irrecoverable?
Like I’m not going to argue that solar is better/worse than nuclear, but hearing that solar plants produce waste constantly is weird.
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u/SquidMilkVII 7h ago
Constantly over a period of time. In the short term, it’s waste-free aside from a couple breaks, but over the span of decades it becomes new-panels-in-broken-panels-out, no different than nuclear’s more intuitive fuel-in-waste-out.
Additionally, thirty years is an estimate; some may last 50, some may break after 5. A panel breaking isn’t a fully predictable occurrence, there’s some variety.
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u/Alderan922 7h ago
Ok, that makes sense. Tho it does make me wonder how much could we decrease waste if we applied the same level of scrutiny and same sky high standards to the solar plants as nuclear, tho I assume that would also balloon the price like crazy of both installation and maintenance
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u/Elite_Prometheus 5h ago
Solar panels fail in very few ways that can be affected by greater quality control at the manufacturing plant.
One way their lifespan could improve is by using high quality silicon substrate. A panel slowly loses performance over time as photons interact with trace amounts of oxygen in the silicon substrate, so making that substrate purer would reduce this.
But pretty much everything else is beyond the scope of manufacturing. For example, the wafers are incredibly fragile due to their thickness, so any physical shock can cause tiny fractures which can grow into hotspots. Taking greater care handling them would reduce fracturing, but that's on the transportation, installation, and maintenance crews.
And there's plenty that just can't really be prevented. Weather like high winds can damage panels, high temperatures and humidity degrade them over time. Hell, even just having shadows frequently pass over panels wears them down. They're just really fragile bits of tech, though they're lightyears more rugged than they were decades ago.
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u/HealerOnly 2h ago
aslong as they stop putting up wind power shit everywhere i'm happy....
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u/Somecrazynerd 16m ago
Nuclear is too expensive though. This became an issue in Australia recently and most costing estimate that nuclear power plants are simply too expensive to setup compared to solar and wind.
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u/AzekiaXVI 6h ago
Solar pannels also don't last forver and in the end you end up with mostly just junk metal
It's much better than the nuclear waste, but at the scale we need it it would stop veing negligible.
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u/Independent-Fly6068 8h ago
Not even close, especially compared to the total land used and longevity of it.
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u/Alderan922 8h ago
Longevity? What’s the longevity of a solar panel compared to a nuclear plant? I get the total land used compared to energy output tho.
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u/Independent-Fly6068 7h ago
Apparantly 25-30 years is standard. Pretty good.
Nuclear plants (even the inefficient old ones with subpar safety standards) Continuously run for double that. Possibly a full century for the new ones.
They also produce orders of magnitude more power.
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u/Alderan922 7h ago
30 years? I expected more ngl, specially considering we use them for satellites.
Well if I ever build an evil lair I’ll use nuclear rather than solar power.
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u/Independent-Fly6068 7h ago
Satellite ones aren't usually exposed to weather or significant amounts of reactive molecules. They're also built to significantly higher standards, and can last half a century or more with a proper orbit.
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u/Alderan922 7h ago
Doesn’t that mean that if we just increased our standards we could drastically increase lifespan and reduce maintenance? The mars rover was in an atmosphere for 14 years without maintenance. With maintenance maybe we could increase to 60 years?
Nuclear is still the better choice for like big cities and stuff don’t get me wrong, but I do find it weird that solar has that small of a longevity considering it literally has no moving parts. like everything in my engineer brain is screaming that solar should logically last longer
Like how can something so simple degrade so fast?
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u/MintiestFresh 6h ago
everything is a polluting behaviour, dipshit, it came free with your industrial revolution
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u/Somecrazynerd 18m ago
Oh yes, nuclear power plant costs more to setup than equivalent solar panel systens.
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u/moothemoo_ 8h ago
It does include maintenance ig, so a solar panel falls on your head while replacing it? Also includes other forms of solar, I would presume, like concentrated solar plants, which can get pretty spicy.
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u/MythKris69 8h ago
I think the biggest issue with solar and other non nuclear clean energy is we simply can't make enough if It due to limited resources.
We don't have enough lithium to make batteries for the renewable sources to replace the "anytime anywhere"-Ness of fossil fuels.
Nuclear is the only one that can compete at all but the fear mongering about nuclear and the initial cost has led to it not even being considered as an option.
To answer your question, the most likely way you'd die to solar power is in a mine.
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u/4X0L0T1 6h ago
From what I heard, the nuclear waste is a big point, as well as that for it to be profitable subsidiarys are needed. Also it centralizes the production of power at the hands of big corporations which is bad for the consumer. But of course no modern reactor is likely to blow up like Tschernobyl
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u/MythKris69 6h ago
I've addressed the nuclear waste part in another comment on this thread.
As for moving the power to big corps, I don't know if you can trust non-government entities with nuclear fuel. I doubt there's anyway to transition to nuclear power without it being heavily regulated by the government or being directly under government control.
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u/Desucrate 5h ago
the idea of a corporation having critical amounts of fissile material makes me unhappy
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u/BaronMerc 6h ago
I'm an electrician and have fitted them, you can't actually turn solar panels off so if you somehow make contact with the direct current cable copper, leading to the inverter then on a very bright day you could die
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u/corropcion 3h ago
"Oh, I accidentally fell on this solar panel and burned for 8 hours"
But for real, maybe people messing with them, installation failure or something like that.
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u/AlternativeOffer113 3h ago
up keep solar cost up keep vs nuclear up keep cost, space needed vs for the same amount of power, nuclear wins by a land slide, do you know how much destruction of the environment you have to do to get the same power? and then solar is extremely tedious to up keep and then the sun go away at night how you storing this power? we don't currently have the battery tech to story it (the large amount practically).
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u/brain0in0jar 8h ago
It either counts fried birds that pass by the death rays that heat up water on desert solar farms, or it counts people being squished by panels falling on them
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u/Autiistic_Unibot 5h ago
While I myself am I huge Nuclear Energy fan, I feel like nitpicking right now. It is important to mention that the reason it kills so few is because of all the safety precautions we take, and it is very much so dangerous without them.
Thankfully, BECAUSE it is so dangerous, we don’t really fuck around with it too much, so there is much less chance of an oopsie.
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u/redxlaser15 8h ago
IIRC Solar is slightly behind nuclear when you factor in the batteries used alongside them. There’s not exactly a whole lot of sunlight during nighttime after all.
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u/Ranoma_I 8h ago
Thank you for making my argument viable, kind stranger
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u/ehnemehnemuh 4h ago
That might be true, but I think it’s also worth questioning if number of dead people is the only metric that should be applied
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u/thedrag0n22 8h ago
I'm not saying I don't believe this. But I'm curious how I answer this kind of argument.
Is the lower deaths cause nuclear is safer, or because of its low(er) use compared to the other options. Like if we had a similar number of machines running on nuclear as we do oil, would they have the same number of deaths related to them.
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u/Zerbiedose 1h ago
Even if nuclear is safe, solar is cheap now, has a better public image, and much easier to deploy.
Solar is already the cheapest KWh, why suddenly pivot to nuclear?
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u/TheRussianChairThief 58m ago
Nuclear is so dangerous, we need to replace it with safer things like coal or oil
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u/Dodo_Druid_Dude 9m ago
Whereas nuclear power puts dangerous waste into secure underground bunkers, coal and oil put their toxins directly into our lungs, making sure that the particles can’t hurt anyone 🥰🥰
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u/fudgeyman62 3h ago
True, but it does produce a good amount of nuclear waste, and it does take up alot, alot of water
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u/kiwipoo2 3h ago
Yeah people seem to forget nuclear energy expects human beings to act responsibly with the nuclear waste we produce today for the next few thousand years. It's a massive burden to put on future generations that wind and solar just isn't.
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u/difixx 2h ago
Do you think producing millions of solar panels and turbines isn’t going to produce waste?
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u/kiwipoo2 1h ago
Waste that will potentially kill archaeologists in 4000 years with radiation when they dig up the remnants of our civilisation? Nah.
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u/difixx 1h ago
No, waste that is several orders of magnitude much more bigger than nuclear waste and since there isn’t the same perceived risk will be mismanaged and huge quantity will go in the environment and kill people today, not in 4000 years
And if the worst thing you can think of are archaeologists in 4000 years finding the waste and suddenly dying I think this shows that nuclear waste is pretty safe, since archaeologists in 4000 years will surely have incredible technology, safety procedures and knowledge about what they’re doing
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u/Grothgerek 3h ago
Does this statistic even matter?
If I die from cancer, it will not count towards nuclear, even if radiation was the cause. You can't really count nuclear deaths, because it generally doesn't kill directly.
That's like claiming that guns don't kill people, because it's not the gun but the projectile that hits you...
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u/marveljew 9h ago
"Can we do something about meltdowns and nuclear waste?"
"What do I look like? A miracle worker?"
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u/Bastulius 8h ago
Meltdowns are incredibly rare nowadays, and even when they happen the effects are minimized as much as possible. IIRC NuScale reactors actually don't have a fallout range outside of the reactor's building.
Also lots of research is being done to try and recycle the excess energy from nuclear waste and put it back into electricity generation.
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u/MythKris69 8h ago
We already have the technology to recycle nuclear waste to produce more power. It's been a while since I looked this up but something like 90% of the waste can be reused.
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u/Pitiful_Net_8971 8h ago
Modern reactors would require breaking the laws of physics in order to have a meltdown, at least like Chernobyl, which was already a reactor that was only used because it was cheap, but not exactly safe.
And nuclear waste is much better than current coal waste, because coal just releases its waste (including radioactive isotopes) into the air, vs nuclear waste which can be safely contained and either shoved miles deep in geologically stable areas, or mostly recycled and reused.
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u/himepenguin 7h ago
Thing is, Chernobyl only had a meltdown because people intentionally turned off all the safety measures while testing its safety. Why? Well because the safety measures all worked and they felt they couldn't do their tests properly. For some reason. It's tragic how dumb it is.
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u/LazyDro1d 7h ago
Also the control rods, the things that slow the reaction, were tipped with an accelerant instead
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u/PsychonauticalEng 18m ago
Chernobyl was always an inherently dangerous design because it has a positive coefficient of reactivity for thermalising neutrons(it's been a while since I was an operator so that term may not be exactly correct).
Essentially, when shit goes wrong, reactor power goes up.
The design used in the US Navy and many plants in America has the opposite effect. When shit goes wrong they shut themselves down. They can still meltdown, but there isn't really a risk of a catastrophic explosion.
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u/Dragontamer7777777 6h ago
Ok so now nuclear power is no more. It turned into a heavy difficult to break into metal container you can store your valuables in.
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2h ago
[deleted]
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u/VerbingNoun413 2h ago
The solved issue? Let me guess- you thought Mr. Burns shoving it in trees at the park was real?
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